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Opinion Contributor

Newtown's wake-up call on firearms

It’s common sense that putting guns in schools will create a culture of fear that does nothing to keep our children safe. It’s common sense that background checks should be rigorous and required, not just an occasional formality. It’s common sense that nobody needs a military-style assault weapon or high-capacity magazines to defend their home or hunt for recreation. It’s common sense that we can retain our Second Amendment rights without giving up our right to live, work and go to school in peace and security.

Common-sense gun control measures could include eliminating the private sale loophole to require universal criminal background checks for those purchasing weapons; renewing and strengthening the federal assault weapons ban that expired in 2004; and placing limits on high-capacity magazines, like those used in Tucson and Newtown, that allow a shooter to inflict unimaginable carnage in a matter of minutes.

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The NRA has stifled this common-sense debate for too long. In doing so, it ignores the concerns of the American people and even its own membership. Republican pollster Frank Luntz, working with Mayors Against Illegal Guns, polled gun owners and NRA members and found that the vast majority are in favor of measures that the organization has fought against, including tighter background check requirements and mandatory reporting of lost and stolen guns.

Two weeks after the Tucson shooting, still grieving and in shock, I had the heartbreaking honor of attending the State of the Union address as the guest of President Barack Obama. I hoped then that we could talk seriously about common-sense gun control measures. But our federal elected officials did nothing. In just the past two years, the United States has seen 14 mass shootings in which 185 people have been killed or injured. Thousands more have died from gun violence on a smaller scale, a massacre in slow motion. Newtown was a costly wake-up call. This time, let’s not ignore it.

Daniel Hernandez Jr. serves on the governing board of the Sunnyside Unified School District in Tucson, Ariz., and is a member of People For the American Way Foundation’s Young Elected Officials Network. In the spring of 2011, he was an intern in the office of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Readers' Comments (2)

What you call common sense I call failed policy. Gun free zones are the failure. They have done nothing but create killing zones where the evil and murderous are assured a large list of helpless victims. Where are these mass murders happening? GUN FREE ZONES! It's a fact that the 8 million CCW permit holders have a better record on violent crime rates than law enforcement officers. Statistically speaking, CCW permit holders commit less crimes than those even anti-gun liberals trust to protect them. It's also a fact that millions of guns have been sold in the US over the last 20 years and yet the violent crime and murder rates are at all time lows. What you call weapons of war just happen to be the most affective weapons for defending life. Semi-automatic guns are used for that purpose an estimated 500,000 times a year.

Spend some time reviewing your facts and the common sense you pedal won't sound so common. Even with the mass shootings in our schools and public places our kids are safer today than they were in 1992. According to the FBI crime statics both our violent crime and murder rates are down more than 50% in the last 20 years. All this while gun sales have been skyrocketing and the CCW permit movement has made sure more legally owned guns are on our streets. Nearly 4% of the population now have CCW permits. If the number of guns in the country was the problem than the murder rate would increase with record gun sales and CCW permits.

Why are you so afraid of good guys with guns? Culture of fear? I have guns in my home and teach my 5 year old son to shoot. He's not in fear. Fear comes from those who don't blame criminals for crime. You can't control evil so you attempt to control the tools used by good to fight it. Is that common sense? I think not.

Data shows that over the last 15 years there has been an average of 2-3 of these horrible shootings per year. The first question I would like answered is "How are the proposed new laws going to identify and stop 2-3 individuals out of a populatin of over 300 million people without hugely affecting the majority of the population?' Second, "How cost effective is it to try and restructure all the gun laws in an attempt to fix a horrible event that occurs with about the same frequency as a person winning a lottery jackpot?" Lastly, we never hear about how many murders and such occur as a result of drug or gang violence as it reflects on the total number of murders in the country.This is an important consideration because gang members and other criminals will largely be unaffected by gun laws.

During the debate on gun control, people should keep in mind that these masss murders occur at locations that are "gun free" zones. (You'll never see a mass murder event attempted in a police station.) Also,it would be interesting to see the ratio of these events analyzed as a function of the severity of existing gun laws.

I would like to close on a very important point. I have heard Obama and others say "Common sense tells us..." or some other variant. Having been a well published researcher for over 30 years, I have learned thatstatements like these are completely emotional and almost always are wrong. Let's get some honest data and not information that has been highy skewed by the analyst so that the data tells the story the analyst wans to tell.